Tanner Darren, Van Hell Janet G
Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA; Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Neuropsychologia. 2014 Apr;56:289-301. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.02.002. Epub 2014 Feb 11.
We investigated individual differences in the neural substrates of morphosyntactic processing among monolingual English speakers using event-related potentials (ERPs). Although grand-mean analysis showed a biphasic LAN-P600 pattern to grammatical violations, analysis of individuals׳ ERP responses showed that brain responses varied systematically along a continuum between negativity- and positivity-dominant ERP responses across individuals. Moreover, the left hemisphere topography of the negativity resulted from component overlap between a centro-parietal N400 in some individuals and a right hemisphere-dominant P600 in others. Our results show that biphasic ERP waveforms do not always reflect separable processing stages within individuals, and moreover, that the LAN can be a variant of the N400. These results show that there are multiple neurocognitive routes to successful grammatical comprehension in language users across the proficiency spectrum. Our results underscore that understanding and quantifying individual differences can provide an important source of evidence about language processing in the general population.
我们使用事件相关电位（ERP）研究了单语英语使用者在形态句法加工神经基础方面的个体差异。尽管总体均值分析显示对语法违规呈现双相的左前负波（LAN）-P600模式，但对个体ERP反应的分析表明，大脑反应在个体间沿着消极主导和积极主导ERP反应的连续体系统地变化。此外，消极反应的左半球拓扑结构是由于一些个体中中央顶叶N400与另一些个体中右半球主导的P600成分重叠所致。我们的结果表明，双相ERP波形并不总是反映个体内可分离的加工阶段，而且，LAN可能是N400的一种变体。这些结果表明，在语言能力范围内的语言使用者中，存在多种通往成功语法理解的神经认知途径。我们的结果强调，理解和量化个体差异可以为一般人群的语言加工提供重要的证据来源。
